Next day they marched under ebony and calabash trees, from the shells of which the natives make vessels of various shapes, for while they are growing the fruits can be forced by outward pressure into almost any desired form. Pheasants and quails, water-hens and pigeons flew up screaming when the black porters tramped along the path, winding in single file through the grass as high as a man. Hippopotami lay snorting unconcernedly in a stream that was crossed. Then came the forerunners of the rainy season, splashing and pelting over the country, and pouring showers pattered on the grass. Both the horses of the caravan succumbed, one or two fellows who found Bagamoyo more comfortable ran away, and a dozen porters fell ill of fever. Stanley was still full of energy, and beat the reveille in the morning himself with an iron ladle on an empty tin. On they went through dense jungle. Now a gang of slaves toils along, their chains clanking at every weary step. Here again is a river, and there the road runs up a hill. Here the country is barren, but soon after crops wave again round villages. Maize fields in a valley are agitated like the swell of the sea, and gentle breezes rustle through rain-bedewed sugar-cane. Bananas hang down like golden cucumbers, and in barren places tamarisks and mimosas perfume the air. Sometimes a halt is made in villages of well-built grass huts. Over swampy grasslands soaked by the continuous rains Stanley led his troop deeper and deeper into Africa. After having lasted forty days, the rainy season came to an end on the last day of April. The men marched through a forest of fine Palmyra palms, a tree which grows over almost all tropical Africa, in India, and on the Sunda Islands, and which is extolled in an old Indian poem because its fruits, leaves, and wood can be applied to eight hundred and one various uses. Afterwards the country became more hilly, and to the west one ridge and crest rose behind another. The porters and soldiers were glad to leave the damp coast-land behind and get into drier country, but the ridges made travelling harder. They encamped in villages of beehive-shaped huts covered with bamboos and bast, and surrounded by mud walls. Some tracts were so barren that only cactus, thistles, and thorny bushes could find support in the dry soil, and near a small lake were seen the tracks of wild animals, buffaloes, zebras, giraffes, wild boars, and antelopes, which came there to drink. Then the route ran through thickets of tamarisk, and under a canopy of monkey bread-fruit trees, till eventually at a village Stanley fell in with a large Arab caravan, with which he travelled through the dreaded warlike land of Ugogo. When they set out together the whole party numbered 400 men, who marched in Indian file along the narrow paths.